


bless us both the beasts and children

by Summerlightning



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: Pale Romance | Moirallegiance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-20
Updated: 2013-01-20
Packaged: 2017-11-26 04:21:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/646519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Summerlightning/pseuds/Summerlightning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barefoot, your strides send up splashes and you fix your look on where the sky terminates and the sea starts up, on and on across the water and the ripple-slats of slate that are the rollers way out.  Inside and not, you jangle.  You sing high because of it, pleading — you stare and you snuffle and you hope.  The stars in the sky, on the sea reflected and shining — the stars inside you the same, they all hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bless us both the beasts and children

\---

Down on the beach is your comfort and your pain together, all rolled up into the same sound and sensation as the waves on the sand.  Thumping and pushing and scraping:  the thoughts in your pan, the foam through the shells, clattering and sucking like spit in snaggled teeth.  You amble through the dim dunes with a fresh pie balanced on your clawtips.  Even like that the heat of it tempts the flesh of your fingers.  Your thumb is a blister big as a caegar, a dull throb at your paw’s apex, but it’s been like that before and again and you’ve never minded it much.  You don’t start minding it now.  
  
A hum boils up in your chute -- it could fester there, it could ferment.  It could rot and ruin you entire, so you let it trickle out your maw slow and sweet-shatter broken and somewhere along the way words get stuck in it, to it.  Ain’t you a bard?  The sound bounces along the breakers:  the song of you, coarse and warbling.  The ocean eats it.  You step in after or during, you’re not sure which. The water is cold.  
  
You stop when it hits your knees.  It slurps at the fabric of your pants, rubs raw against the skin beneath.  A hard shiver runs through you and you clutch your pie proper, wanting to scoop out palmfuls of the bright sludge to siphon it into your mouth.  It’s too hot still to eat, so you ladle the tin hand to hand and you pace, slogging through the slippery surf.  Barefoot, your strides send up splashes and you fix your look on where the sky terminates and the sea starts up, on and on across the water and the ripple-slats of slate that are the rollers way out.  Inside and not, you jangle.  You sing high because of it, pleading -- you stare and you snuffle and you hope.  The stars in the sky, on the sea reflected and shining -- the stars inside you the same, they all hope.  
  
But there’s nothing in the water for you.  There’s nothing usually.  Now’s no different.  You could sing forever and he wouldn’t come, or you could try to sing forever and bleed your chute to a dry, wasted wreck doing it and he still wouldn’t come.  Sometimes you fret you’ll forget what it was like to look at him -- what he looked like at all, come to that.  Then you remember in a fizzy bubbling oily rush the huge dripping holes of his nasals, his snout coming up out the water and how he snorted spray and snot and slime all over you, and how you laughed.  Laughed, laughing -- you want to do that again, you want to laugh, laugh and mean it, you want to get your chuckle on, you want to more even than you want to stuff your face full of your pie.  The tin lists on the heel of your paw, piping.  The sopor slides.  
  
You consider the black empty ocean, where he isn’t.  Where you are.  
  
O but it weighs on you heavy, this thing, this shitawful motherfucking horrible business of being where you’re all up and at and where he’s all up and not.  You try not to ponder it much but you do anyway, you ponder-ponder-ponder, you just can’t help your goddamn self, and more than a hum’s boiling up in you now for it.  You have the distant realization, the hazy epiphany that what it is could fester too, could ferment, could rot and ruin you entire.  Maybe it could do you deserving and crush you flat.  It’s feathery fumes in your sacs; your fingers get possessed of a twitch-spasm and you clench them, trying to quell it.  You ache throughout.  Your fangs itch in their gumsockets.  Your eyes burn the way they burn when you forget yourself and stare absent at the horizonline come morningrise, and everything that is you rings righteous wreckage and runs dribbling from your oculars, gibby purple tears that smear your paint and fill you with muzzy surprise and a barkbeast’s reluctant, tail-bent embarrassment.  This is the wicked shit gone most profoundly wrong.  You are sorry.  You are sorry for everything, but at your highest and lowest you are sorriest for you.  
  
You tip the pie to your mouth the same time you kneel in the sea.  The water drubs you relentless and unending, soaking you, and you swig the sopor through your teeth and it is your pain and comfort together, all rolled up into the same sound and sensation as the waves on the sand.  You stare slant-eyed out across the water, the empty endless water and you ache and you burn and your thoughts, they chunder.  They chunder and you, ruined rotten you, you start to _hate_ \--  
  
But before you do -- before you can manage it even the meager way -- you drift.  
  
\---  
  
You quit that lonesome drift when someone takes grab of your hair and wrenches it motherfucking hard straight up.  Like you didn’t know they could your oculars take to popping open.  You yelp, jabbing sideways with your elbows, and the troll who has paw on you smartens up and lets go.  As such you’re dumped back into the froth of the sea, sand in your mouth, your rightmost horn scraping shell.  Hurts bad.  Hurts blazing.  The sky’s abalone-pale with soon to come morning, and next breath you roll onto your belly to behold your aggressor.  The tide squirts spittle loathsome up your shirt behind.  You gape.  
  
The troll you bear witness to is a dense little square fucker, with feet like blocks and fists the same and emphasis on the _little_.  If you got up on just your knees you’d still have him by a hamshackle and a length of rope besides.  His shoulders make a mean hoop of muscle under his head.  His mouth opens and he licks at his overbitten teeth in a worried way you find immediately precious:  he regards you, and you him, and then he’s down on the beach beside you despite that he’s shaking for the awed desperate fear of it, pawing at you.  
  
“You incredible pusknuckle,” whispers one Karkat Vantas, whispers, _whispers_ when you always expected him to shout, and it’s furious and tender the way his voice is, and from his flap falls out next, “ _Gamzee_ , hi -- what, what were you even--”  
  
You touch him.  You can’t help it.  Behind him the sky’s shining up brighter and brighter, a plate being polished, and his funny rounded aurals flicker at the press of your claws.  He snorts surprise.  Gives a little toss of his head, hoofbeast-like:  words die on his mouth and that thing, his mouth, his motherfucking mouth, it crooks bitty upwards in a hesitant harsh scar of a smile.  You’re not sure he’s real.  You say similar.  You say, cracked and creaking, “I ain’t altogether positive what I’m seeing is what I ought to be up and believing, brother.”  You add, “What I’m doing presently, is it motherfucking true?”  
  
You dig your claw gentle into the side of that smile he’s got.  Feels real, at least -- warmer than you could ever be, downright hot even.  Kettle-burn coal.  Your keratin goes _tik_ against his teeth.  He rears back a little on his heels in the sand to take survey of you, and you feel the tremble coming off him, radiating around his whole self like some shivery fog.  Scared and not, that’s Karkat.  That’s you too.  Abruptly he turns his face to your palm, mushing his nub snout against the lines on it.  The puffs of his breath there are everything you’ve ever wanted and waited for, your comfort and your pain together, the same sound and sensation as the waves on the sand.  You are yourself breathless holding his air in your hand -- holding him, him so near.  Your astonishment could crack open the sky and pour out in gobbets of stark blubbery blue.  
  
Behind him the sea gurgles _whuck-shhhh_ , the combers gray with flickers of yellow-orange on them reminiscent of scales.  Morning, morning.  Your oculars throb.  Looking at Karkat mesmerizes.  Looking at Karkat hurts.  He’s talking, you realize belatedly, but you’ve paid no attention to his words on account of you’ve been besieged by the way the sinews on his neck pull when his chin moves -- by how the growing light pings off his horns and tinges them tangerine.  You twist your fingers in his hair.  His locks are working on being ringlets.  His head’s hot.  Sweaty, damp.  Did he charter a sloop here?  A shuttle?  Did he just all up and run the whole motherfucking way?  You don’t know where keeps his hive -- didn’t know he had the knowledge of where you abided either, you don’t know distance, you don’t know what’s possible and what’s not.  Overhead the stars are filming over white with washout sunglare.  They’ll be gone soon.  Morning.  O morning.  
  
“Hey,” Karkat says then.  You catch his eyes like nets catch crabs:  you’ve got him but there’s claws in his gaze too, hooked into you.  You’re both holding on.  That’s the way it motherfucking is.  His tongue flickers over his teeth a second time.  “Okay,” he says, “you grape crispy fritter of a clusterfuck, come on, we have to get inside.  You’re burned bad already.”  His palm skates down your arm nearest him.  It’s sheeting fire, it’s molten, it’s awful.  You look down and see the seeping scape of blisters on your skin, some of it pus-blotchy craters that popped while you were witless in the waves.  Karkat sees you staring.  Sees you put off and awed.  “Yeah,” he admonishes you, “you can’t take another day out here.  Pure luck and the shadow of the cliffs saved you once, but--”  
  
“I didn’t mean,” you try.  Your throat’s a wreck, your words a squawk.  Karkat’s eyebrows make a black ridge on his forehead going up.  “I didn’t mean it, I wasn’t trying to drown out my pan for _permanence_ , best friend, that wasn’t--”  And incredibly you stop to laugh.  You’ve wanted to forever and now here it comes pouring out your chute, twisted awful and poisonous and thorny treacherous.  You try not to, not in front of Karkat, but once you’ve started you can’t stop and you just laugh and laugh ’til something in you turns over and you’re sick on the sand, heaving up what the sea put in you when you lost yourself in it.  Not that it belonged there proper anyway, the ocean with its currents -- what you’ve got sloshing around in you already is enough of a tide to ebb away anything worthwhile.  You retch yourself empty.    
  
“Oh,” says Karkat when you’re done.  It’s neither a sound of contempt nor contemplation, just pity, the kind of pity that comes from wrapping a knowing around a common pain.  He leans over you.  Every small part of him is your shade.  His hands come down and fold flat against your skull, hot hard pads.  His claws knead at your horns where they start.  Grunts heave themselves up out of you and for one misnomer of a moment you think you might puke again, but opening your mouth yields instead a giggle and what could be tears, only Karkat doesn’t quite let them come.  “Gamzee,” he urges you, “come on, shush now, come on.”  
  
His hands fall down the sides of your head then.  He cups your face, smooths his thumbs over your cheeks, the right and the left and the left again like it needs it more.  His pads come away caked white.  You close your eyes against the throb of the day in the distance and he drags you to your feet, and you stumble and stagger into him and he stiffens, his shoulder shy but affixed in your ribs.  You cuff your paw about his sleeve.  You are hungry, you are hopeful, you don’t look at him for what hurt it could do you to see anything but what you want to see.  In your chest your pusher clenches and he works an arm awkward around the hanger of your hips.  
  
“Gamz,” he says.  That’s all, you think, that’s all you needed, you could expire at this precise moment and it would still be all you ever needed.  But you hear him lick at his teeth, his precious motherfucking teeth.  He gives to you, “Okay,” and starts up shuffling, the sand sliding soft underfoot.  He pulls you with him.    
  
You follow him home.


End file.
